Perhaps the most popular of all canonical
American authors, Mark Twain is famous for creating works that
satirize
American formations of race and empire. While many scholars have
explored
Twain's work in African Americanist contexts, his writing on Asia and
Asian
Americans remains largely in the shadows. In Sitting in Darkness, Hsuan
Hsu
examines Twain's career-long archive of writings about United States
relations
with China and the Philippines. Comparing Twain's early writings about
Chinese
immigrants in California and Nevada with his later fictions of slavery
and
anti-imperialist essays, he demonstrates that Twain's ideas about race
were not
limited to white and black, but profoundly comparative as he carefully
crafted
assessments of racialization that drew connections between groups,
including
African Americans, Chinese immigrants, and a range of colonial
populations.
Drawing on recent legal scholarship,
comparative ethnic studies, and transnational and American studies,
Sitting in
Darkness engages Twain's best-known novels such as Tom Sawyer,
Huckleberry
Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, as well as his
lesser-known Chinese and trans-Pacific inflected writings, such as the
allegorical tale "A Fable of the Yellow Terror" and the yellow face play
Ah
Sin. Sitting in Darkness reveals how within intersectional contexts of
Chinese
Exclusion and Jim Crow, these writings registered fluctuating
connections
between immigration policy, imperialist ventures, and racism.
